


stimming with the trigger of the gun

by procrastinatingbookworm



Series: even if heaven doesn't take us we tried [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crowley (Supernatural) Has Feelings, Crying, Dreams vs. Reality, Episode: s11e17 Red Meat, Gunshot Wounds, Hallucinations, Mental Breakdown, Other, Visions, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 09:04:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18280022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: It was going on four in the morning when Dean woke from a colorless nightmare and found his dead little brother at the foot of his bed.Followswould hell be something better.





	stimming with the trigger of the gun

It was going on four in the morning when Dean woke from a colorless nightmare and found his dead little brother at the foot of his bed.

Sam just stood there, one hand hanging by his side, fingers curled but not in a fist, the other resting on his stomach, the spread of palm and fingers not even beginning to cover the blood soaking his shirt.

Dean knew a gunshot wound when he saw one—knew a slow and messy death, knew fabric rough with blood and fingers slick with it.

He waited for the stab of agony through his stomach; waited for the terror so visceral it pained him. It never came. It never came, because that wasn’t Sam, standing at the foot of his bed. That wasn’t Sam, because Sam was dead, and he didn’t die of a gunshot wound.

Knowing his brother was long since buried was a comfort.

Not-Sam walked toward him. He lowered his hand from his stomach. Dean didn’t recoil; he’d seen worse, and this wasn’t Sam, wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter.

“You’re not real,” he told Not-Sam, choking on a mouthful of grief so sharp it cut his tongue.

This wasn’t real, but it was still wearing Sam’s face. Dean’s brother, that he watched die, let die, buried. Hadn’t tried to get back, because in all his hours of reorganizing the library, he couldn’t bring himself to read a single word. Couldn’t bring himself to cut his palm for a ritual, the way Sam had in the minutes before his death.

It wasn’t real, but Dean wished it was, because a gunshot he could treat. Blood was blood. Metal was metal.

Not-Sam reached into the wound he didn’t live long enough to have and dug out the bullet.

(Part of Dean’s head started calculating—the bullet was intact, good, that made it easier. Pressure, now, stop the bleeding, or slow it down until he could get some stitches in. Gauze and tape. No time for ointment or cleaning. This was a hospital injury, he just needed to get Sam stable for the drive.)

“Dean said you would want this,” Not-Sam said, holding out the bullet like a gift.

“Why?” Dean asked, letting it be dropped into his palm.

“Think about it,” Not-Sam said. He sat down on the edge of the bed, sprawled like Sam would, his blood soaking the sheets, his hand (gore-soaked, scarlet, bits of his insides stuck under his nails) resting on Dean’s ankle, the kind of casual touch that decades in the same space didn’t allow them to live without.

Dean put the bullet in his mouth. blood—not Sam’s, but close—spread across his tongue.

Dean swallowed.

///

Dean swallowed, but he couldn’t force it down.

“—spit it out,” someone was saying, one hand on his face and the other pushing between his lips. “How old are you? Spit it out, Squirrel!”

The fingers—thick and stubby, but soft—pressed into his mouth, reached down into his throat and took hold.

Crowley pulled Dean’s heart up out of his throat and held it up to the light.

“That’s it, I’m taking your guns away,” he said, while Dean retched, nothing coming up but spit and bile, dripping onto the sheets where Not-Sam’s blood didn’t stain. “When you said _eat a bullet_ I didn’t think you meant _literally_.”

Dean blinked. Not-Sam was gone. Crowley was holding the bullet in one hand and cupping Dean’s face with the other, his thumb between Dean’s teeth, peering into his mouth.

Dean inhaled, exhaled, spit blood.

“Feathers!” Crowley called, wiping diluted scarlet off his face. “Castiel, I could use a hand in here!”

Crowley’s hands were replaced by Castiel’s, cradling his jaw far more tenderly, holding Dean’s head up while Crowley paced a circuit of the room, gathering every gun he saw, until his arms were full of cold metal.

“Dean,” Castiel asked, “why did you do that?”

“Sam,” Dean answered, glancing at the bullet that Crowley had dropped onto the bedspread. There was no blood on it.

“Because Sam is gone?” Castiel asked, hesitant and soft.

Dean shook his head. “Sam gave me the bullet. Said Dean… his Dean… said I would want it.”

From across the room, busily unloading every gun he had collected, Crowley sighed gustily. “Hallucinations, really? And here I thought we were making progress.”

Castiel shot Crowley the filthiest, most furious look Dean had ever seen on the ex-angel’s face. He didn’t even need to say anything, Crowley just wilted like an under-watered flower and lifted his hands in defeat.

“Don’t,” Dean muttered, voice thick. He wasn’t crying, but swallowing the bullet made it cut into his throat, and the swelling made it hard to breathe. He wasn’t crying. “Don’t look at him like that. Scares him.”

Crowley scoffed, filling his pockets with bullets, surrounded by empty magazines and useless guns, but he didn’t deny it.

“I’m sorry,” Castiel said, so softly that his mouth didn’t even move.

“Me too,” Crowley muttered.

“Look at you two,” Dean cooed, shifting away from Castiel’s touch and wiping his mouth. His throat ached. “We’ll make a beautiful friendship out of that animosity yet.”

“You’re delusional,” Crowley muttered. “Literally.”

“Unless you’re seeing a bleed-through from a universe where Sam survived the trials,” Castiel said.

“That’s possible?” Dean asked. “Why am I asking that? What _isn’t_ possible, one way or another?”

“It would make more sense than a hallucination that handed you a real bullet.”

Dean closed his eyes and rested his hand on the sheets, where Not-Sam had bled. He lifted it again and licked his fingers. Copper spread across his tongue.

“Well, bugger me sideways,” Crowley murmured.

“Bleed-through,” Dean said, numbly, staring at the blood on his palm. “Was that an intentional pun, or…?”

“I don’t make puns,” Castiel’s voice was wooden with shock. “Is that… Sam’s blood?”

“Not-Sam’s. Other-Sam’s. Not-Dead-Sam’s.” Dean rubbed his fingers together. His head hurt. Just a side effect of not getting enough air through his swollen throat. “From the universe where I wasn’t such a fuck-up and didn’t let my brother die.”

“Dean,” Castiel said. “Sam chose to close the gates of Hell. He knew what that entailed. The angels are much less of a threat than they were, the demons are out of the picture. That was a good day, despite the losses. Who knows what state that other universe is in, because Sam could not choose unselfishly.”

“I know,” Dean murmured, his hand inexplicably drifting to his right forearm. “It still hurts, that there was a way out of that, and I didn’t take it. _He_ didn’t take it.”

“Sam did take the way out,” Crowley muttered, hands in his pockets, eyes red with unshed tears. “ _You_ didn’t. And you’re not going to. He died so we… you… could live.” He lifted two handfuls of bullets, let them spill through his fingers and back into his pockets. “So I’m taking these.”

“I know,” Dean repeated, quietly breaking into tears.

“Can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs,” Crowley said, and immediately winced. “Sorry. Sorry, I know. I’ll see myself out.”

Castiel tugged Dean off the bed, holding him like a mother would hold a child. “These sheets need to be washed. Crowley, would you…?”

“I don’t know the first thing about doing laundry,” Crowley griped.

Dean pulled away from Castiel, scrubbing at his eyes. “I’ll do it. Don’t argue with me. I need something to do with my hands.”

Without another word, he stripped the bed down to the mattress and carried the bundle downstairs, to the ancient washer and dryer that they’d never cared enough to replace.

///

He came back sitting on the dryer, listening to the washer run somewhere to his right. He hadn’t lost time like that in a while. A week at least.

Dean laughed at himself.

He pulled the gun out of the shelf beside him and fired at the wall. He didn’t know what he was doing until it was done, didn’t understand the repercussions until footsteps pounded down the stairs.

Castiel opened the door and stopped dead. Crowley skidded to a stop behind him. They wore twin expressions of shock that would have been humorous without the tears.

“Are you trying to give me a bloody heart attack?!” Crowley shouted, grabbing the gun from Dean’s hand as Castiel sank to his knees. “You idiot, never do that to me again, I’ll kill you myself.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Dean told him, but he opened his mouth and closed it around gunmetal, his finger on the trigger.

///

“How many guns do you have in this bloody place?” Crowley was saying, wrapping gauze around Dean’s left wrist. The right had already been done, cuffed to the cot.

“We should leave,” Castiel was saying, their voices layering on top of each other as Dean floated back to awareness. “This place is too full of weapons. I’m sure we could find somewhere to live… somewhere that isn’t so empty.”

Crowley cuffed Dean’s other wrist to the cot and stood up, pushing everything else to the other side of the room, out of reach.

“You’re good at this,” Dean called, watching Crowley’s shoulders stiffen and then slump. “Done it before?”

“It’s not too hard to figure out,” Crowley snapped back, pushing at a rack of cuffs that he had once worn, when he was still a demon. In memory, perhaps, or in guilt, his hand rose to the side of his neck, to the track-marks that still hadn’t healed, emblazoned on his skin like a mark of shame.

“What’s happening to me?” Dean asked.

“You’re having a psychotic episode, I believe,” Cas answered. “Brought on by sleep deprivation and grief.”

“I’m not broken.”

“On the contrary,” Crowley muttered.

Dean blinked, and Sam was standing in the doorway, blood dripping from the gunshot wound.

Dean lifted his hand and found a gun in it. He closed his eyes and fired. The recoil snapped his wrist like a wishbone.

///

Castiel was holding his hand. The gun was gone, Dean’s wrist was whole. Someone was making high-pitched whimpering sound, like a kicked puppy.

Crowley was sitting with his head in his hands.

“Don’t lie to me,” he was saying, like a broken record. “Don’t lie to me. Please don’t lie to me.”

“There was no one,” Castiel was answering, needle caught in false reassurance. “There was no one.”

Dean went under again.

///

Sam was stroking Dean’s hair with scarlet hands. Sam, or Not-Sam, just real enough that the blood trickled down Dean’s forehead and ran into his eyes.

“He’s awake,” Castiel said, somewhere out of Dean’s view.

“How do you know?” Crowley answered, his voice caught between accents.

“He’s crying.”

The damp heat of blood traced its way down Dean’s face, but by the time it reached his lips, it was salt water.

“Squirrel?” Crowley said, on the insufferable side of Europe once again. “You in there?”

Sam was gone.

Someone was whimpering again.

///

Crowley’s pockets were full of bullets, and they weighed down the sweatpants that used to be Sam’s--

(Dean remembered the bloodstained tear just below the knee, the way Sam had stumbled in the mess of the library and scuffed his knee against some artifact that left a tiny scar on his knee. He remembered stitching up the seam when Sam tore it open on the corner of a motel table, remembered the way the cuffs dragged on the ground, how dirty they had gotten until Dean pinned them up.)

\--revealing the humanity of him, the hair on his stomach, the weight on his hips. Dean tilted his head, examining the skin he could see, imagined the man the meatsuit had been before Crowley decided that he wanted it.

Crowley pockets were full of bullets and his skin was iron and salt, his teeth were gunmetal and his heart was smoke as red as his grieving eyes.

Castiel stood guard over both of them, like the angel he wasn’t.


End file.
